Provenance: Academy Records Annex, Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
I always had this theory that the fundamental difference between Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin was that while Zeppelin riffs were something you had to sit down and learn, Sabbath riffs were something you … unearthed. Something primal. You sit there, noodling around in the minor pentatonic scale, maybe throwing in some Big Honkin’ Bends™, and this nasty, evil riff appears under your fingers. If you’re lucky, you figure out that you unconsciously nicked it from Sabbath before you show it to someone else.
Sabbath are the supermassive black hole around which all heavy music gravitates. Their pull is inescapable, and it’s not just down to Them Riffs, either. Bill Ward’s swinging plod (or is it a plodding swing?) is, along with John Bonham, a lodestar for any drummer seeking to both groove and smash. (Ward calls jazz pioneer Gene Krupa his “definitive influence.”) And because Tony Iommi was one of the first guitarists to detune the instrument — as low as a minor third below standard — if you should happen to be taking that route to make your band sound heavier, you’re standing in the shadows of Sabbath as well.
Which brings me to The Sword. The group’s reputation as Sabbath-derivative was one of their defining characteristics when I first encountered them 2006, thanks to Guitar Hero II, which included the Age of Winters track “Freya.” That song has basically become the band’s theme song, even as they moved away from their avowed Sabbath and Zeppelin worship into occasionally proggier and now more Schlitz-swillin’ territory. Age of Winters was their full-length debut, containing material worked out by group founder J.D. Cronise prior to the band’s formation. It was a hit for indie label Kemado, selling — per Wikipedia — at least 80,000 copies (half the cited links in that page are dead, so it’s probably not a stretch to assume Age of Winters has passed the six-digit mark at this point).
One thing I’ve always loved about the Sword is their relatively high-minded references, at least for a stoner-rock band. The cover art for Age of Winters, done by Conrad Kelly (who according to his website, will accept synthesizers in exchange for art, which owns) is an Alphonse Mucha homage, and its liner notes contain a William Butler Yeats passage.
The Sword also love their instrumentals. Age of Winters opens with “Celestial Crown,” which is pretty much the thesis statement for the rest of the record: Behind-the-beat guitars doing Big Honkin’ Bends™ and drummer Trivett Wingo going Hulk Smash on his cymbals. The song segues into “Barael's Blade” which rips. Cronise jumps up to the top of his range for a high harmony on the line “Spiller of the silver blood!” and it’s one of my favorite moments on the record. Cronise produced the record himself, and while I hear some harshness to the cymbals’ high end, at least on this pressing, the man does know how to track a guitar or four.
Another thing that owns about this record is that, for all the Sword’s expansiveness, Cronise has a decidedly pop-economist streak to his songwriting. “Freya” is catchy as shit, it’s possible to get in and out of Age of Winters in under 45 minutes, depending on how long it takes you to load up the bong. This track in particular has some of Wingo’s most air-drum-begging work and Cronise nods to Iommi’s habit of tracking multiple guitar solos atop one another on the song’s first guitar break.
First of all, please enjoy Cronise’s Zappa facial hair in this video. Between that and the samurai swords displayed on his stone fireplace’s mantle, he’s exactly one ringer-tee away from getting kicked out of a Grand Funk Railroad show (on the Closer to Home tour) at the Richmond Coliseum for selling weed.
Second of all … “Winter’s Wolves” is so fucking good.
It makes me want to build a time machine for the express purpose of finding the maybe-never-existed “god bear” deep in the Russian wilderness and headbutting it to death. It makes me want to forge my own blade like Nicholas Cage in Mandy, before mastering the forbidden art of necromancy to raise Genghis Khan’s entire army (1206 AD lineup) from the dead so that I can die fighting them on the windswept steppes of Mongolia. It makes me want to German suplex a tiger.
Story time: The only time I’ve seen The Sword live was at Washington, D.C.’s Black Cat club in ‘07, at which point the club was already too small for them. We drove into the city in the middle of a snowstorm, and people lost their shit so much at “Winter’s Wolves” — the whole crowd started howling in the middle of the song — that Cronise had to tell us to calm down, lest the band actually be crushed by the crowd. (He said something like, “You can tell all your friends that you saw the Sword and JD said calm down and it was lame, but please.”)
I’m going to resist my impulse to just write out every lyric to this song, but they are the platonic ideal of wizards ‘n’ shit songwriting. I may or may not just have teared up reciting them aloud in the apartment. Cronise’s voice does this little whinny “May the earth swallow your hosts” — probably because the spirit of a lich-king possessed him in the vocal booth — and it just gets me every. Single. Time.
Original Sword drummer Trivett Wingo was self-taught, and I have to say that his clattering playing goes a long way towards the band’s charms on AoW. The band replaced him with Santiago "Jimmy" Vela III, who you can see playing in that home-recorded version of “Winter’s Wolves” (on which they deploy a “Tom Sawyer”-esque Moog line in the outro, which also owns). I’m not going to get into a comparative discussion of their merits as drummers, but I will say this album is as much Wingo’s record as it is Cronise’s. Wingo is now an accountant in Charlottesville, Virginia; he quit the band mid-tour in 2010 over severe touring-induced anxiety, which the remaining members have spoken of with varying degrees of animosity.
“The Iron Swan” has some of the first non-extremely-loud-electric textures on this record, with a nice acoustic intro that quickly turns into as close as the band gets to all-out thrash, at least on Age of Winters. I don’t really have any criticisms of this album at this point; as with a lot of debuts, it was clearly pored over for a long time. Nice little (very short) bass outro, too. A fun fact about this song is that it's the namesake of band’s second line of beer (the first being Winter’s Wolves Beer, which owns) and they put out a hot sauce, too, at one point, which also owns.
The Sword’s compositional template of FAST RIFF—> HALF-TIME RIFF—> FAST RIFF AGAIN becomes apparent and a little tired at this point in a full-length, though the main riff to “Lament For the Aurochs” does have this little dropped-beat skip move that I really love. The Sword should probably have their own wiki at this point simply for a taxonomy of all the different animals and historical and literary references they mention. For those of you wondering at home, the aurochs is “an extinct species of large wild cattle that inhabited Asia, Europe, and North Africa,” and in this song alone, we’ve also got:
the liquid light of Leviathan
the sunken cities of the Saurians
the shimmering of Avalon
the ages of the alchemists
the Huntsman's hounds
the ancient Wyrm
the basilisk
the phoenix
Anyway, that all owns.
Cronise pulled out some of his neater arrangement tricks for the back half of the record, it seems. “March of the Lor” — an instrumental in eight movements — opens with a cool high-register bass riff and an insistent (and eventually semi-grating) ride pattern from Wingo. I have no idea what a Lor is, as it’s nigh-on-un-Google-able, but this song also makes two references to spiders, one to plagues, and one to “Halora,” which may be an Elder Scrolls reference. And HEED, KNAVES, the return of the BIG HONKIN’ BENDS™. Some cool Wingo fills and a straight-up blast-beat (and a set of sleigh bells?) at one point as well. Hail.
Cronise’s approach to vocal harmonies and judicious deployment of harsher singing timbres (he approaches black-metal territory on this tune at one point) are consistent high points on Age of Winters. I’m not sure if he double-tracked all these vocals manually or simply went the Eventide Harmonizer route, a la the Ozzy solo records, but it’s an approach I really love. “Ebethron” lurches along with a duly heavy series of riffs, but it’s not really the strongest album closer, IMO it should have been sequenced earlier on the record and left something with more punch for the finale.
It’s hard to grade this record on anything but a steep curve, as my memories of it are pretty inextricably tied to the weightless rush of being in college and living in my first apartment. I think I air-guitar and drummed through all of Age of Winters over the entirety of Fairfax, Virginia and a chunk of D.C. before I turned 21. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and while the Sword were able to eventually dodge their Sabbath comparisons, none of that factors into my love of this record, which, like those Sabbath riffs from so long ago, was not so much learned as unearthed.